Blue Cross Blue Shield:
“operate on “screw the customer” as their guiding principle. “
“for sending out those letters to get Dr.’s to rat out any patients that they think might have had a pre-existing condition when they signed up, no matter how long it’s been since they signed up, and then lying about it in a press release. I won’t even touch on their capricious rate increases and cancellations of the past.”
“They have made an art of denying claims and coverage to people with valid claims. “

CNN: The commenter who nominated CNN did so in the following nomination comment: “Blackwater, Halliburton, Exxon, Diebold, Fox, CNN and the NY Times.” I think you can figure out from the context why CNN is on this person’s shitlist.

Keep in mind there is no one company called Blue Cross Blue Shield. It is a group of different regional insurance companies that share a brand and network, but they have very different policies and attitudes.

It would be unfair and inaccurate to lump them together as one company. Some BCBS affiliates are actually quite good. Some are awful.

Finally! A contest. Let’s see. BCBS screws its customers. CNN harbors right wing nutjobs like Glenn Beck who enable the sort of political climate that, among other things, allows BCBS to continue screwing its customers, all while claiming to be the news network more Americans trust. Hard. Really hard. I might have to flip a coin once you people get the votey-clicky thingy up.

Blue Cross Blue Shield is not one company. It is an association of independent regional insurance companies that share a brand and network. Each company operates independently and has its own policies, and their actions and decisions can vary significantly.

It’s unfair and inaccurate to lump all the BCBS affiliates together as one company. A few of them are pretty good overall. Some of them are awful. But the point is they are not all the same. Heck, there are even two separate BCBS companies in California (Blue Cross of CA and Blue Shield of CA).

Let’s face it: CNN (along with ALL of the other cable news networks, heck pretty much ALL American news organizations) is crap. Weeks of coverage of Anna Nicole Smith? Political coverage that focuses on what Senator Clinton is wearing? Not to mention news stories during the run-up to the Iraq war that were practically written by the government.

All of that having been said, as long as you understand that CNN (and Fox and MSNBC) are entertainment networks, not news networks, you can adjust your filtering accordingly.

BCBS on the other hand, is just plain evil. They make a profit from deliberately denying service not based on your medical needs but on their bottom line. I personally have had nothing but trouble with them since the very first day I was “covered” by their organization.

BCBS is the best rationale I can think of for government run healthcare, and that’s saying a lot.

This has been the hardest match up for me. I hate CNN, which has become a pitiful tabloid-esque excuse for news reporting. But I can always get my news other places. But if Blue Cross Blue Shield is your insurance company… your screwed. My vote goes to BCBS.

@SuffolkHouse: It’s not about the brand, its about the fact that these are different companies. How can you blame one company for the faults of another?

NO ONE has an insurance policy with Blur Cross Blue Shield. You have a policy with BCBS of Florida. or Anthem BCBS. or CareFirst BCBS.

It’s like the STAR System ATM. yes, there may be a bunch of crappy banks, but just because some bank of part of the same ATM network as Bank of America doesn’t make them any worse.

Are you going to hold BCBS of Florida or BCBS of Illinois responsible for the decisions of Blue Shield of California, even though they have zero influence over that company?

Keep in mind several BCBS insurers are either nonprofit or (at least partially) owned by a state government, while others are private behemoths like Anthem/WellPoint. Again, you can’t lump them together.

not even a contest. Blue Cross bid our contract for insurance assuring us that they would provide the exact same services, THEN turned around a year into the contract and denied claims we could take with our previous services.

Obviously you are connected to the internet, use that for news. CNN has become a neocon tool since they became part of Time-Warner. CNN has stopped reporting the news and started trying to make the news. It has become clear that their neocon bias pervades all their “reporting”.

CNN crashed and burned when 9/11 hit the bricks. They had a lot of conflicts in information coming in, repetitive reports going out, their webpage was next to useless even after they went HTML lite.

The best sources on that day was Slashdot.org and IRC. They stayed up and we had onsite folks firing off reports on the pages that kept us up to date and was surprisingly accurate. The start of Web 2.0 was on that day when the citizen started to report the news as it happened.

So I was just reading an email that I received from my insurance carrier (Aetna) about their delay in their ending coverage of monitored anesthesia for colonoscopies. They said because of misinformation given to the public from websites (like the consumerist I’d imagine) they delayed pulling the plug on covering anesthesia. They didn’t say they were abandoning their plans just yet just delaying them until they can strong arm their members into agreeing to stop using monitored anesthesia in favor of the cheaper sedation methods. I would guess most of the BCBS affiliates will do the same and drop their coverage of monitored anesthesia if they haven’t already.

As I get older, insurance companies make me very nervous and anxious. That’s a shame.

I still don’t agree with having subsidaries nominated. It should be the whole company. Thought that when MTV was up as well. These are huge media conglomerates, and we are only singling out one little subsidary. Whole companies shoudl be nominated, or not at all.

I vote BCBS. Did you know that if you lose your job and are told your coverage is “through the last day of the month,” so July 31 or whatever, that only means through midnight ON July 31? So nothing on July 31 is actually covered? Standard procedure for them.

Was it CNN that promised Saddam’s government that they would not cover negative news from Iraq in exchange for being allowed to maintain a bureau there? Result: Slanted news and outright lies broadcast from this supposedly independent news agency.

I agree that it’s iffy with BCBS, because each state has its own BCBS entity. I’ve run across good and bad BCBS’s

I really despise CNN, and the joke it’s turning into. Also, just noticed a little t-shirt icon next to some of their headlines – I guess you can now get t-shirts with some of the “funnier” or stranger headlines? Urgh.

I don’t work at BCBS nor have I ever worked for any health insurance company. But I have had experiences with two BCBS insurance companies when living in different states. And I find it ridiculous that a reciprocal-exchange network that doesn’t exist as a single company can be nominated for anything (whether it’s best or worst). I think it honestly reflects poorly on Consumerist and shows a lack of understanding and/or research. Would you say that because Capital One issues Visa cards and your local nonprofit credit union offers Visa cards, all Visa card issuers including your local credit union should be evaluated as a whole?

For example, my experiences with Blue Cross of California were awful and represent everything bad about health insurance companies. No surprise, they are part of Wellpoint, the Evil Empire of health insurance. My experiences with Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina were great, though — they both had very good customer service and never really created any problems when paying a claim. Maybe this is because they were non-profit and chartered by the state government of NC. An apples and oranges comparison.

If you’re nominating a health insurance company, why not United Healthcare? They are the company who paid their former CEO (accused in the whole stock options backdating scandal) $160 million to get rid of him. Now that could pay for a lot of health care.

I can’t complain about Blue Cross, they have paid some very large bills for surgery for me with no hassles at all, Something near 1/2 million of which I paid only a few hundred. Never had any problem with them whatsoever.

@truthie: Well that sounds like a better tone out of you. You were sounding like a BCBS PR rep there. When I worked for the State of California while I was living in Chicago I had either BC or BS of California. The admin people at my doctor’s offices were often impressed with their coverage and impressed by their high limits on coverage. Now that was over a decade ago and things may have changed.

But of course I was with the state government as well which we all know they usually get really good benefits and would be in a very large group plan due to the volume of employees they’d have to cover so they are little more sensitive to their subscribers needs. I’d suspect that small firms like my current employee would not have the same level of service a huge state government would have.

Most BCBS companies are not-for-profit (not same as non-profit). They aren’t as evil as some of the other BCBS companies out there. They should really not lump all of them in with each other. When your claim is denied, it isn’t denied by BCBS, its denied by the local insurance group. The only reason they share the same brand is so that I can go from one location to another and still stay “in-network”.

@Bladefist: Y’know, in a way I respect Fox News. They are kind of honest about being pro-corporate fascists. CNN and the networks are a bit more covert about being the same, to the point that a lot of suckers actually believe they are “liberal”.

To everyone complaining that Blue Cross Blue Shield is run by several separate entities – I would be completely willing to vote against “health insurance companies” rather than specifically Blue Cross.

@Bladefist: Just because they’re not as right-wing as Fox does not mean they’re not right-wing. If they were not right-wing they would have destroyed this Administration by now, just like the press did to Nixon. CNN is conservative and pro-establishment in any objective sense of the word. Don’t confuse their occasional show of messing with Republicans with their overall agenda. They have been cheerleaders for the warmongers too, and to understand why, you just need to follow the money. Defense contractors and oil companies profit from war. They “win” even if we all lose.

@youbastid: Oh, I don’t mean they’re honest in the sense that they “tell the truth”. They’re just “honest” in the sense that everyone understands what their real agenda is. CNN, not so much.

This is a no brainer. As I’ve posted before, health insurance companies take 40-45% of every dollar WE give them and pocket it as pure profit. Consumers have GOT to wise up to what’s going on and demand their representatives do something about it NOW. Health insurance is something that should not be allowed to operate in a ‘free market’ fashion – health care is something that should be inviolate, highly ethically bound. MDs are supposed to abide by high high ethical standards, so should health insurance, pharmaceuticals, biotech, and hospitals. This is a very fixable problem – one that the f$#@ing politician piece of feces are great at pointing OUT to us, but are useless in coming up with a viable solution. (like so many other failed governmental policies such as the ‘war on drugs’, the penal system, the social welfare system, etc.)

@Bladefist: They’re bad, sure. But not Fox News bad. I mean, come on. Since when does cleavage trump reporting talent? Since 1996 when Fox News put T&A into ALL of their content. How do you sell right-wing bullshit that’s been discredited for decades? Have some blonde airhead with big fake tits say it. CNN still gets the ‘evil’ award because they at least APPEAR to be a legitimate news organization.

CNN is so blown out of the water on this one, there isn’t even floatasim left over. Lets see a news agency that sometimes puts it’s own spin on things or an insurance company that bails out on you when you most need them. No contest.

Blue Cross Blue Shield hands down. CNN can’t hold you hostage when your life hangs in the balance. And BC/BS was in it up to their eyeballs (late 1960s) when health insurers were theorizing how to convert their product from a function of the free market into a commoditized necessity shifting costs from what consumers were willing to pay in a competitive pricing environment to the five stage process of creating socialized healthcare which guarantees their profits. They suck beyond all comprehension. Further I cannot say without risking banishment.

CNN are just lip gloss and hair spray swine bellying up to the hog trough of PR fax blasts and calling it news.

CNN used to be the “Walter Cronkite” of news integrity. Now it’s no better than Fox and MSNBC for biased, sensationalized reporting.

I think people are so sick of entertainment-focused news that if a network went back to old school hard-hitting reporting with honest to goodness stories without the Hollywood grabbing headlines, it would sweep ratings.

I often watch BBC news because it’s the only place I can watch news without tarted up female newscasters, sensationalized stories, political bickering mixed in.

This is one of the worst (if not the worst) “company” designations in the vote-off. As many have already said, “BlueCross BlueShield” isn’t a nationwide company. Each state is different, some are for-profit, some are not-for-profit, the only thing they have in common is that they license the BCBS trademarks. If BCBS of Rhode Island denied your claim, BCBS of Oklahoma had nothing to do with it.

Having BCBS in there is more like “worst brand in America” – not “worst company.”

Anthem BXBS turned me down for individual coverage because I had cancer six years ago, and take an anti-cancer med. They told me to feel free to reapply once I’ve been “sign, symptom and treatment-free” for 15 years. My oncologist says the anti-cancer med I take is considered “treatment.” So in order to get Anthem to cover me, I would have to go off the drug that keeps me from getting cancer…for 15 years.

Does that make sense to you?

My consolation in all of this is that I expect Anthem BXBS to be gone in 15 years. And I’ll still be here.